2015-04-20 Game Management Advisory Commission Mintues

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Hawaii Game Management Advisory Commission Meeting Minutes—April 20, 2015 eradicate. How does that process work and where does public discourse actually happen during that process? NA: So a couple of things that were brought up. Willie-Joe mentioned Kohala. I'll speak to that cause that's something that I'm more familiar with. I started out as a community member long before I was an employee of the division. I started out as an assistant, resource assistant, paid through the university— and basically my first five or six years were going out there and documenting the forest— basically measuring the forest via transits. And through that by spending weeks if not months out in the mountains you kinda get to know an area —you've got to know which areas are of high quality from a native vegetation standpoint—where the native birds are —where there's high concentrations in Kohala of pigs. Where the ecosystem altering weeds are located, which ones have good topography? There's a whole bunch of different things going —for things like the Kohala Watershed Partnership that was established and then the Kohala Watershed Management Plan which was developed —there was basically years and years of field work that went into where the important places are both from a native ecosystem standpoint and which areas, at least from DOFAW's perspective and some of the community members are the important areas for the hunting. And so if you look at Kohala Watershed Management Plan the easily accessible areas, even though there's a lot of high quality forest in those areas —those were left out of the watershed fencing areas. So once identified then it goes through the environmental review process where groups, although this wasn't, the GMAC wasn't then —as you guys all know—there were other community groups that were notified. There were countless meetings out in Kohala. Honestly, that— I think some good stuff came from them — but I don't think they really amounted to anything cause they were just huge shouting matches —fast forward ten, fifteen years—the Kohala Watershed Management Plan is gone through this process as spelled out by Chapter 343 — it's approved. OK, then what? At that point we had already had a starting point in Kohala and there's 100 acre rare bog in Kohala and that was —we did a separate environmental assessment for that and in 1997 we started fencing it and by 1998 it was complete and it took us to 2000 —the year 2000 to get it so there are no pigs— and then there was follow-up ginger control, So, you're asking me a long question, so I'm trying to give you as detailed a response. So first things that will go into that is we'll set up a bunch of transect and transect are ways of measuring activity of ungulates, birds, what kinds of weeds are in the forest, how much weeds are in the forest. Things that are starting to come up on our radar. 14